The enclosure, the private heart of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, is absolutely silent as its abbot Father Joseph Delargy sets foot inside.
The quiet is somehow reflected in the architecture.
There is plain, rather than stained, glass in its windows – the floor feels like lino (though isn’t).
The red arched doors are the only sign of any sort of decoration.
Mount Saint Bernard is a Trappist monastery, one of three in the UK. Founded in 1835 and located 13 miles from Leicester, it was the first Catholic abbey to open after the Reformation.
The land was given by local Catholic convert Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, the financial contribution by John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, and the design – for no fee – by Augustus Pugin.
“Solemnity and simplicity are the characteristics of the monastery,” Pugin wrote in 1843, “and every portion of the architecture and fittings correspond to the austerity of the order for whom it has been raised.”
Mount Saint Bernard’s 14 Trappist monks – properly, members of the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance – live a very particular kind of life.
They rise at 3.15am and attend church seven times a day. They rarely leave the monastery, have no televisions or holidays, and spend a lot of their time either in total silence or reading. They eat fish, but not meat, so as “to be in union with the poor”.
I arrive at 10am as a monk is making a rare trip out to the dentist; for Fr Joseph, who has been a monk at Mount Saint Bernard for almost 40 years, it is practically lunchtime – not that anyone will be heading out to pick up sandwiches.
“You might have to go out to get supplies, but you wouldn’t just say, ‘oh, I think I’ll go out now,’” he says. There are no trips to the big M&S just for a look? “No! But one of the monks does go to the cash and carry once a week.”
The lifestyle is necessarily all-consuming. “We see ourselves as more observant and rigorous [than other orders],” says Fr Joseph. “Each group has a different calling. One of ours is to live the monastic life quite strictly.”
Fr Joseph felt called as a teenager and was 24 when he entered the monastery.
Before that, he worked in various jobs – “the longest was in a laboratory in a pharmaceutical factory, waiting until I could come here. I liked the idea of the radical nature of the life – the silence, the anonymity, the manual labour.”
It might seem odd to think of a monastery as a business, but these old buildings don’t pay for themselves. “We don’t receive any money from the church or the state – we have to be economically viable and self-sustaining,” says Fr Joseph.
Until 2014, sustenance came from the dairy farm on the monastery’s 300-acre estate. In the Rule of St Benedict, Fr Joseph explains, “it says, ‘they are truly monks, when they live by the work of their own hands’. We are supposed to earn our living by our own work.”
Dairy farming, the epitome of the pastoral scene, was perfect for this – and for a long time, it was enough – but between 2005 and 2023, more than 9,000 dairy farms closed in Britain, according to government data, and in 2014 Mount Saint Bernard’s was one of them.
“It was a struggle to make money,” says Fr Joseph. “The only way you can make money dairy farming today is to have massive herds and milk three times a day. You were always running to stand still.”
Having decided to close the farm, they needed another source of income. While teaching in Rome, the monastery’s Fr Erik Varden met monks from Norcia Abbey in Umbria, who had started a brewery there in 2012.
When Fr Erik returned to Leicestershire in 2013, he floated the idea of a Trappist brewery at Mount Saint Bernard. The community was intrigued and between them visited almost all of the other 11 Trappist breweries around the world.
Following much deliberation about what their beer might taste like and, thanks to Dutch brewery consultant Constant Keinemans, in March 2018 Mount Saint Bernard began brewing its first tipple.
Tynt Meadow is a 7.4pc beer named after the site on which the 19th century Trappists first settled. The brewery opened, per tradition, with a statue of St Arnold, the patron saint of brewing, on the wall.
Now, the monks also make a 5pc blond variety, since “although people liked the original it was a bit strong for our market – the English tradition is more like 4pc,” says Fr Joseph.
If beer appears at odds with the life of a Trappist monk, it isn’t. “We looked into the appropriateness of it,” he says, “but it kind of mirrors the monastic life – it is a slow product that takes time to make, and there’s long been a tradition of monks brewing.”
The hope is that somehow “some of our spirit is in the product – that when people are drinking it at home, a part of us is in that”.
It is now in plenty of homes. “A lot is sold before it’s produced,” says operations manager Peter Grady from behind a pallet of kegs set to go abroad – but make no mistake, “we are a monastery with a brewery – we should never become a brewery with a monastery”.
Beyond beer, the farmland is let, there are eight residential and commercial properties, an abbey shop, public access to the grounds, and a brewery shop which sells Trappist beers from around the world – but the monastery is not a conventional business.
Getting people in to do work isn’t always straightforward. Grady often has to say, ‘no, you can’t work in the monastery between those times’.
“It’s about finding people that understand the ethos and it goes for everything – from people we use for sales and marketing to electricians,” he says.
The brewery is part of the charity rather than a separate entity since “the monks would see that as needlessly complicating things,” says Grady. Their preference is for simplicity, and those outside the community “have to come to their way of living”.
Fr Joseph is now on his third six-year term as abbot. He was first elected in 2001 and then again in 2007, after which Fr Erik took over. After Fr Erik was appointed Bishop of Trondheim in 2019, Fr Joseph found himself back in the hot seat. “I used to think that I wouldn’t do it again but I saw it as my duty to accept it,” he says.
There is a significant business element to the role – and even the Trappists are not immune from the cost of living crisis. “We have a great team of employed people that support us, but the wage bill is very big and that doesn’t go down,” says Fr Joseph.
“We see it in the heating, the electricity. We are happy facing the same problems as other people – we don’t want to be privileged. Just as other people worry about these things, so do we.”
All of this is made harder by their religious purpose. “None of us came here to be the managers of buildings or estates. You do that because it’s part of your patrimony and your heritage – we are custodians here, just caretakers – but most people join to get away from that.
“You didn’t join to be worrying about finances and insurance. You’ve seen that and you wanted a different world – but the reality is, that is part of it.”